This weeks invitation

* 4 Pillars of Compassionate Presence practices to help steady our inner resolve

* explore how to hold space for others without abandoning ourselves

* how Zen wisdom can teach us the strength in stillness

* a simple practical Pilates exercise to ground us in our own centre when life feels off-balance

When care is heavy, and you choose rest anyway...

This week, I share a deeply personal reflection on taking a much-needed vacation — and the complicated guilt that can surface when you step away, especially when someone you love is navigating the early stages of dementia with a family member.

As my partner faces his own family’s heartbreak, I find myself re-living the emotional terrain of my own mama’s decline from vascular dementia. The grief is still there — layered, slow, and deeply embedded.

And yet, I chose to go.To rest.To breathe.To not feel guilty.

l’m writing/recording this post from a sunny Marbella, grateful to be with old friends and even more grateful for some time to regroup, reorganise, reprioritise and most importantly replenish my emotional, physical and spiritual reserves ready for the new journey ahead.

l’m here (in Marbella) not only to have a bit of a reprieve from life of late but to also help one of my oldest friends with her new project, a yoga and movement studio - Aum Yoga.

Our friendship enduring marriages, divorces, coming of age, moves, deaths and the pandemic. However together again it feels like no time has past at all. A bit older and hopefully a bit wiser we connect and resonate again in the support of each other’s new projects.

If you’re a regular listener/reader you are probably aware of my journey of late but if your not well l’ve been supporting and living with a partner diagnosed with a painful deep depression and whom as a result has become along unanchored from life’s path. However, now l’m happy to report is once again finding the strength, tenacity and inspiration to forge forward. My partners journey in some parts echoing some aspects of my own journey. Feeling disconnected from the person l once was due to my own perimenopause journey and learning how to best adapt to the next era.

Being away. Not from life, not from love — just from the doing and trying to be there for those who need support and encouragement daily. The delivering. The giving-out-of-what’s-left-in-the-tank in different ways can wear you down both mentally and physically.

It’s a double edged sword, on one side l sense the guilt of me needing some space to tend to myself and on the other side is that feeling of somewhat guilty while my partner carries the heavy and uncertain weight of a family member’s vascular dementia diagnosis.

The guilt of not having the right words — only presence.The guilt of choosing rest when empathy whispers, “Do more.”

But I’m learning that guilt is not becoming.It doesn’t soften the edges of suffering — mine, his or theirs.It doesn’t strengthen empathy — it distorts it.

So I’m practising these Four Pillars of Compassionate Presence

* Deep listening without self-erasure.

* Inclusive Empathy (Empathy that includes me in the circle).

* Replenishment as quiet resistance against burnout.

* Embodied presence over perfection.

Yet beneath all of this sits a quieter ache.A more personal one I didn’t expect to surface so sharply.Because I’ve been here before — with my own mama.

Watching vascular dementia take her, moment by moment. Not all at once, but in slow, painful fragments l cannot lie was one of the most difficult dark times of my life. The repeated loss of recognition. The unpredictability. The deep, daily grief of watching someone you love disappear while still sitting across from you.

Now, witnessing it again in my partner’s family is like standing in the echo of my own past. It’s not just empathy — it’s memory and the weight of it is familiar and heavy. Providing for someone with this dreadful disease is more than caretaking — it’s heartbreak in slow motion and it never really leaves you.

So if I’ve needed more quiet lately, it’s not from absence of care.It’s the opposite.It’s the remembering. The reliving. The tending to my own nervous system before it frays again.

This time, I’m allowing space to hold both:The love and the limits.The empathy and the edges.The urge to help and the need to rest.

Guilt, I’m realising, has no place here.Compassion — for others and for self — is the only thing that fits.

Zen teaches us:"Sit quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself."

Reminding me that not all healing is active.Sometimes our deepest strength comes from stillness — from being rooted, rather than reaching.

When the mind wobbles, I return to the mat. One small act of strength that mirrors resolve from a Pilates perspective is The Pilates Half Roll-Back.

Sitting tall, feet grounded, hands behind thighs.Exhale, scoop the belly in, roll halfway back. Pause. Hold your ground.Inhale to return — spine stacking, calm rising.It’s a physical practice in boundaries, in choosing how far to go, and when to return.

This move reminds me:I can soften and stay strong.I can bend and not break.I can meet the moment — and myself — with compassion.

Guilt, I’m realising, has no place here.Compassion — for others and for self — is the only thing that fits.

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